What impact do shame and guilt have on self-management strategies in people with COPD?

Self-management has been shown to improve health and reduce healthcare costs for people with chronic diseases.

However, we know little about how stigma-related emotions, such as shame and guilt, act as barriers for self-management, especially among people with diseases perceived as self-inflicted, such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). This project will generate such knowledge, using people with COPD as a case of a perceived self-inflicted disease.

The project aims to investigate if shame and guilt among people with COPD are associated with self-management (particularly physical activity), self-efficacy and COPD-specific knowledge.

As a preparation, the questionnaire Self-Conscious Emotions in COPD will be translated, tested and validated in a Swedish context.

Then, this and other questionnaires will be used in a population of people with COPD and the data will be analyzed using a linear regression model.We are an interdisciplinary team with expertise in several methodological and theoretical approaches.

We aim to recruit people with several various aspects of diversity, to gain a variety of experiences of how shame and guilt affect self-management.

Our project will introduce a new questionnaire in Swedish context, which will give new knowledge about shame and guilt among people with COPD.

The project will also provide new and important knowledge about self-management, and how emotions of shame and guilt affect the self-management among these persons.

Finally, the knowledge generated by this post-doc is the first step in a large project idea under development, which includes a subsequent qualitative study aiming to explore what actions can be taken to mitigate these emotions and thereby facilitate self-management.